Sunday has come yet again. This one the most significant to us emotionally since we started this blog. Today is Baby's official due date. Although the date is only a guideline, I am sure many women could agree that there is something difficult about letting a date you'd been hold onto so tightly for the past none months come and go. I didn't actually expect Baby to be delivered today, but it is hard to let the sun set on this date and still not feel any closer to an impending labor than I did two weeks ago.
Such is life. And I very much realize that. In the meantime I'm busy staying at peace with all of this, despite the physical challenges of being nine months pregnant.
This week Joe and I are ever-more grateful we switched doctors about 3 months into the pregnancy. The first doctor, who came highly recommended, provided us with far too many red flags--one of which was determining the due date by ultrasound and then insisting that if I was a week overdue we'd likely induce labor to avoid "a dead baby." (a direct quote...Bedside manners anyone?). Without consulting the fertility charts we'd meticulously kept, the ultrasound showed the due date as October 3rd. Which means we would have induced by now. Scary stuff, and obviously unnecessary.
I will be working from home the next few days, likely until I run out of things to do. I contemplated stopping altogether, but realized that if the birth is still more than a week away I would be twiddling my thumbs and doing far too much online shopping for my own good. On the upside, cutting out a two-hour commute from my day from now until sometime in February is quite appealing.
And looking back on it, I'm glad I pushed through working up until this point. It certainly had its challenges, but it is reassuring knowing that I will have another week at home WITH a baby at the end of all of this. Plus, this past week was a darn important one. We opened an exhibit that had been in the works for a number of months. Thursday evening was the opening reception and it was such a huge deal for me to be a part of something I'd put so much effort into.
The exhibit features letters from our archives and worked to show how significant correspondence is in both mundane and highly significant events. I had used a number of letters from a collection I'd finished processing a few months ago and invited the donor of the collection. The letters we featured were from her great-grandfather, from her father to her mother, and one she had written to her mother some 50 years ago. It sounds strange to say, but I was so honored to meet a member of the family in flesh and blood. I'd spent nearly a year reading, sorting, cleaning, and making sense of her family history and it was so exciting to talk to someone about the individuals I'd gotten to know so closely through their writings.
Or maybe this just makes me sound a bit too attached to my job. What can I say?
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